On 5/14/12, Paul WALL <pauldotwall@gmail.com> wrote:
Cogent is really better suited as a tertiary provider. Not a bad option, but you don't want to lose redundancy when they get involved in their peering dispute or de-peering du jour.
I'll agree with that; if you have less than 3 upstreams; Cogent sounds risky for that very reason. If you have at least 3 upstreams for your network, and you make sure they don't share common modes of failure, such as the same fiber, then Cogents' service may be a suitable choice for one of those. If you are serious about network availability, triple redundancy is the bare minimum anyways, because there are lots of bad things that can happen to an upstream network or their cabling that may take 24+ hours to repair, during which time a single SFP failure, router maintenance on the remaining upstream, or lots of other smaller more common equipment glitches may incur total outage, before there is any real chance to recover redundancy. Least cost options of achieving triple and quad-redundancy are attractive
Drive Slow, Paul Wall -- -JH